Jeff, Image::Magick is on my list of things to get into...

But what is apparent, as others have mentioned, is that GhostScript is being called to annotate your image. Presumably gs is called to generate a bitmap rendering of your text which will then be overlayed on your image.

You may want to look into building ImageMagick with TrueType support. To do this you need to ensure that you have the TrueType V2 library on your system and then recompile ImageMagick.

To check for TrueType support at the least you could use the command:

• use the command: ldd /usr/lib/libMagic.so

If you see "libfreetype" in that list you should have support compiled in.

I have a working build strategy for Image::Magick using the PerlMagick supplied in the distribution. If you pull down the latest perl module for ImageMagick you may encounter difficulties building it.

As an alternative to ImageMagick I'd strongly encourage you to check out the GD package from Boutell.Com. I have gotten GIF annotations to work beautifully using it and I think for tasks such as you describe it might be a better (simpler) choice. (Take that comment with a grain of salt as I have not used Image::Magick successfully as of yet - largely due to time contraints.)

Notes on building ImageMagick and Image::Magick

FreeType - freetype.sourceforge.net
A simple:

./configure --prefix=<wherever>
make
make test
make install
[download]

should suffice

ImageMagick - www.imagemagick.org
Some success building with:

export PREFIX=<whereever>
export CCFLAGS="-I$PREFIX/include/freetype2"
export LDFLAGS="-L$PREFIX/lib"
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX \
    --enable-shared \
    --disable-static \
    --with-modules \
    --with-largefiles \
    --with-magick-plus-plus \
    --with-threads \
    --enable-lzw=yes \
    --without-fpx \
    --with-perl=/usr/bin/perl
[download]

You'll need to be root if you're installing into your OS's Perl libs. As with most things your mileage will vary depending on software confurations, etc.

Let me know how you make out.

Edit: chipmunk 2001-03-27